In a crowded and overheated bar towards the end of the evening a few months ago, I received some strange parenting advice from one of those “Labour strategist” types.
We were discussing – maybe arguing – over the government’s position on Gaza. Eventually I asked if he could provide me with a decent explanation to give my son who had shown me stuff on his phone a couple of days earlier about how Israeli army officers were still being trained by Britain’s military. “Here’s what you say to your son,” began his reply, followed by a portentous pause that made me lean in closer. “You should tell him to fuck off.”
To be clear, I’m not recalling this episode now just to have a dig at someone who has usually seemed one of the nicer ones. And doubtless he would say I was irritating him in all kinds of ways. Nonetheless, the exchange strikes me as symptomatic of an attitude to a whole swathe of voters who have been taken for granted by Labour for far too long.
There has been a factional antagonism towards anyone who might wave a Palestinian flag in solidarity with Gaza or yearns to rejoin the European Union, as well as to those who worry a lot about climate change or display too much sympathy for asylum seekers. For much of the past six years under Keir Starmer, his advisers have been dismissive of such viewpoints, which they thought would alienate the older, whiter and more traditionally working-class voters widely regarded as vital to electoral success.
Yet on Thursday, in the previously rock-solid Labour constituency of Gorton and Denton, the party finished in a disastrous third place. And a lot more of its former supporters voted for the victorious Green party than defected to the rightwing populists of Reform. There were some specific local factors in this seat, including a high proportion of Muslim voters who are particularly angry about Gaza, or possibly some hangover from a decision not to give the Greater Manchester mayor, Andy Burnham, special permission to stand.
The result of this week’s byelection, however, is no outrider. It bears out what every opinion poll has been showing since Labour was elected, namely that the loss of support to Reform on the right is far smaller than it is to parties on the left flank. And the belated recognition of how this imbalance may now be creating a very different dynamic for both the party and the government.
Previous assumptions that progressively inclined voters fearful of Reform can simply be “squeezed”, or scared back into the Labour fold, have been tested to destruction. In the Caerphilly byelection for a vacant Senedd seat last autumn, they preferred to back Plaid Cymru rather than Labour for the first time. In Gorton and Denton, there was genuine anger from some of those who campaigned there for the party about tactics that they felt “insulted” former Labour voters. This included attacks on the Greens’ drugs policies with outlandish claims they wanted to turn playgrounds into “crack dens”. One minister suggested the party’s campaign organisation had become so “hard-wired” into “rightwing tropes” that it almost seemed to have lost the capacity to communicate with much of Labour’s electoral base.
Indeed, for some, the general sense of despair is of such intensity it might once have provoked an effort to oust Starmer as prime minister. But he has probably been largely immunised from an immediate challenge by the way the party, both in parliament and the country, rallied around him a couple of weeks ago when much of the media was already writing him off.
Attention over the weekend will shift from the fragility of Starmer’s position to that of the world, as the US and Israel carry out military strikes on Iran: prompting thoughts here that it might not be the best time to replace a prime minister who has looked relatively sure-footed on the global stage, and certainly offers the public more reassurance than either Zack Polanski or Nigel Farage. Next week, Rachel Reeves will deliver her spring statement, where a series of improving economic indicators will allow her to claim the government is now getting some reward for the difficult choices it has made during the past 20 months.
But no one, either in Downing Street or beyond, believes the threat to Starmer has gone away. The party stepped back from the brink earlier this month for largely negative reasons, including the absence of a viable alternative candidate in a succession contest that would inevitably see Labour turn inwards and away from the electorate.
Most of those I’ve spoken to over the past 24 hours assume he has merely got himself some breathing space until elections in Scotland, Wales and the English regions in May, by when Starmer will need to have developed a positive case for staying on.
He is hampered in this task by a shortage of human capital in No 10, where toxic office politics sometimes seem to matter more than the real kind. The prime minister is unlikely to fill key vacancies for chief of staff and communications director before May, not least because any candidates for these posts need to know they have some prospect of serving for more than a few weeks.
Even so, his friends and allies believe he is finally asserting his own personality and values on a government in which he has too often appeared like the vegetarian manager of a butcher’s shop. And, in the past few weeks he has started acting with the urgency that comes with knowing these may be some of his last.
Starmer won a battle with Elon Musk over stopping the use of AI to produce sexualised deepfake images. He was also uncharacteristically swift to condemn Manchester United’s co-owner Jim Radcliffe for repugnant remarks about immigration. After acknowledging his own error in appointing Peter Mandelson as US ambassador, the PM has now written to Labour MPs admitting that he needs to change the “culture” of an administration that has often appeared remote and high-handed to his backbenchers.
Starmer is aware of the danger of “overcorrection” - in which he drapes himself in the mantle of the populist left, for which he would be as ill-suited as some of the previous outfits from the populist right he has tried out before. Do not expect him, for instance, to suddenly abandon policies on small boats crossings or returning asylum seekers, which he believes are beginning to work. But he has returned to the roots of his own pragmatic and decent centre left politics, which have always been about spreading opportunity across society and improving the dignity of everyday lives.
For instance, the launch of government proposals to reform special educational needs provision this week notably avoided channelling the Daily Mail catnip about an “epidemic of overdiagnosis”, a ploy his team might once have found too tempting to resist. Instead, it saw the prime minister tell the story of his late brother, Nick, who was born with learning disabilities, to explain a nuanced and well-developed policy about the benefits of inclusion in mainstream schools. That felt much more in keeping with his character than some of the thing his government has produced in his name.
While those circling the wagons to defend him acknowledge that it’s not enough for the prime minister just to show extraordinary resilience in the face of pressure, they also suggest there is still time for this to develop into something that more resembles redemption, if he can start overcoming some of the daunting obstacles ahead. According to one of those who knows the prime minister better than most: “Keir would not have been able to live with himself if he had been forced out of office early without showing the country who he really is and what he’s about.”
In this era of shouty, polarised multiparty politics, where everybody seems to be telling everyone else to “fuck off”, there are plenty more who will say all this is too little and possibly too late to transform his fortunes. But Starmer will at least try.
Tom Baldwin is the author of Keir Starmer, The Biography
